Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

We’re thrilled by the response so far to Adium 1.4, with over 540,000 downloads in just 4 days.

We’re already hard at work on Adium 1.4.1. Please be sure to file constructive reports on Adium Trac – commenting in an existing ticket, if there is one, rather than clogging the system with duplicate tickets – to help us triage the amount important issues to address. Overall, the response has been resoundingly positive; please work with us as we continue to refine this huge release 🙂

As always, comments to this or any other blog post are not the appropriate forum for a bug report or question!

There are lots of reports coming in that some people have had their entire AIM buddy lists disappear. AOL is aware of the issue and they are looking into it. If you are experiencing this issue, please be patient. We will provide an update when we know more.

***UPDATE***

Everything seems to be back to normal. If you’re still having trouble, it should be back up soon.

Yahoo! Japan recently changed some of their server settings. To be able to connect again in Adium 1.3.10, you need to change the Login Server to the current server IP address.

To obtain that information, load http://cs1.msg.vip.ogk.yahoo.co.jp/capacity and look after the text “CS_IP_ADDRESS=“. The numbers and dots after that are what you should put in the Login Server field, without the preceding text.

Zac West, developer and webmaster of Adium for the past several years, has been doing a fantastic job during the development cycle of Adium 1.4, not just with coding (including our upcoming Twitter and IRC support) but also with resource maintenance, organization, and direction. He has shown admirable dedication to this free, open source project, to the great benefit of the one million Adium users worldwide.

It’s my pleasure, with the support of the rest of the Adium development team, to name him co-lead developer of the Adium project, changing my own title to the same in the process.

Congratulations are in order! I look forward to the great places Zac will help us take Adium in the future.

Howdy folks. We’ve posted a release candidate for 1.3.5rc1. I don’t want to deal with having two betas simultaneously, so we’re keeping it short and simple here on the blog. The only changes are in libpurple and the Facebook chat plugin. Please respond here with any issues specifically related to 1.3.5 over 1.3.4.

In case you haven’t notice, we’ve now joined our aviary brethren on the .im ccTLD. adium.im is now our new domain name! Everything redirects from adiumx.com, so you don’t have to worry about any problems during the transition (updates, RSS feeds, etc).

A distributed version control system makes and merging significantly easier. In other words, simplifying these two things makes it significantly less time consuming to work on 1.4.1 while also working on 1.5; sharing changes between two separate branches is often a problem.

It took a lot of debate, though not all that recently, for us to finally decide to switch to Mercurial for our version control needs. I’m really enjoying it so far; it’s fast, it’s efficient and it’s easy to grasp. There’s a few issues we’ve run into, but hopefully we can figure out solutions. Right now the main concern is the fact that our binary copy of libpurple in the source code is significantly impacting the size of the repository.

You can now find our Mercurial repositories at hg.adiumx.com. We’ve written up a small amount of documentation so far on acquiring the newest Adium source and on getting Mercurial. The latter is very, very easy on Leopard, and slightly harder on Tiger. Our repositories are, as always :), being hosted by our awesome friends at Network Redux on a new server setup we’re getting ready to use.

The great part about using a distributed VCS is that every single person’s copy of the repository is a full-fledged copy of the repository; the only difference between the server’s repository and yours is that the server has scripts set up to trigger events, and it’s a trusted source for nightlies and other fun things. This makes it very easy to continue development during or recover from a significant server outage. Should the worst occur, we could easily restore our server records based on developer repositories, if need be.

To that end, I’m happy to say that our two main repositories, adium (currently 1.4) and adium-1.3 (1.3.x development) are now mirrored hourly at Bitbucket, a service which quiteafew of our developers use for their personal source code needs.

Our old SVN access is now read-only; all information on our SVN server is now available through our mercurial repositories, except one or two insignificant, non-working plugins. No future commits will occur in SVN (in fact, trunk and branches/adium-1.3 currently have #errors in them to intentionally prevent use), so you should transition anything that uses them over to Mercurial. Enjoy. 🙂

A major annoyance in instant messaging is the amount of spam prevalent in the Yahoo and MSN networks these days. Largely because of the “email as contact name” paradigm, these contact addresses are easily scrapped from websites. We don’t like it any more than you do.

In an attempt to combat this, I’ve created a plugin called Challenge/Response. It works by hiding messages from unknown users until the user answers a question you have picked. For example, you can set your message as, “What is the square root of 49 in numerical form?” Until the unknown user answers “7” all of their messages are hidden from you.

Unknown users are those not on your contact list, not in the C/R white-list, and those you do not have a chat window open for. If set to do so, C/R will log the messages you receive to a group chat. It can also hide messages from all blocked users, for protocols like MSN where blocking only hides status information.

Since spam bots can’t read the challenge, it’s unlikely for them to respond and get past the filtering system. The downside is that people who want to talk to you for the first time may be confused or unable to answer; by making your challenge and response easier, you can avoid this problem.

Challenge/Response isn’t being included as part of Adium because it’s more of a band-aid than an actual solution, and because presenting it as a third-party plugin allows it a few luxuries that being a core part of Adium wouldn’t allow it. Eventually I’d like to see some sort of intelligent filter which is able to tell the difference between spam and non-spam messages, possibly with something like a Bayesian filter used by e-mail clients.

If you run into any bugs, or have any suggestions, feel free to make a comment here or on the Xtras page for the plugin. Since we don’t have an in-app way of updating plugins yet, check back on the site every once in a while to make sure you’re using the latest version. Enjoy. 😉